


If Ever True Love Comes to Me

by noondaize



Category: ATEEZ (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Teenagers, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Coming of Age, Delinquent Choi San, Delinquent Jung Wooyoung, Emotional Baggage, Emotionally Repressed, I'm assuming??, M/M, Problem Children, Running Away, Sexual Tension, Smoking, Sneaking Around, Stargazing, Super Unnecessarily Vague Angst, Teen Angst, Underage Smoking, Vague setting, but only slightly - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-28
Updated: 2021-01-28
Packaged: 2021-03-14 17:28:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29049933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noondaize/pseuds/noondaize
Summary: “You’re the worst, Choi San,” Wooyoung whispers. Not a secret, not a question— but the truth.“You’re the worst because you think you’re so much more awful than you really are.”(It's under the blanket of the stars that runaway misfits San and Wooyoung find a little respite.)
Relationships: Choi San/Jung Wooyoung
Comments: 4
Kudos: 33





	If Ever True Love Comes to Me

**Author's Note:**

> Hi there!
> 
> This was something I started writing last night while half asleep, and I decided to pick it back up today and just finish it off so that I could post something new :) It's really unnecessarily angsty to be honest, but oh well. My mental state is like a roller coaster and it's going DOWN right now lol
> 
> Title is taken from Baek Yerin's "Interlude". It's a really pretty song (that entire album is) and I thought the melancholy/introspective tone kind of reflected the way I feel WooSan is in this fic. 
> 
> Anyways, enjoy.
> 
> -n.

“I’ve never done this before.”

“There’s a first for everything,” Wooyoung shrugs. His cigarette is so close to the end of his mouth, threatening to tip away and fall far down into the earth— but the clutch of his lips is tight and determined to hold the nicotine captive. San feels himself connect the dots somewhere; like a certain part of him that is far more coherent and struck a little genius can probably equate Wooyoung’s addiction to an overarching idea of his life as a whole— but the generalization is lost short of his sparkling eyes and caramel skin.

San feels nothing if not naive and held prisoner to this moment in time. He’s no better than the burning cigarette between Wooyoung’s lips, he knows. Slowly rotting away into ash, trying to swell up in the small space of Wooyoung’s lungs and make a feverish bruise of it. Immortalizing himself in the form of something as fleeting as smoke.

“You coming?” Wooyoung calls over his shoulder, tone bored as he climbs up the rest of the way on the rickety ladder. It was giving way underneath his body but he pays it no mind, moving step for step along the rusted metal and climbing atop the edge of their school's roof like he’d reached the peak of a mountain.

He looks back at San like he has— conquered everything; had come, had surveyed with an unamused glint in his eyes, and had stained his way through the fabric of everything in sight. Wooyoung’s name was among the stars and his touch was seeping into the atoms of every breath he took, and San so desperately finds himself clinging to the idea of being marked down to the bone by his fingers.

“I’m a little scared,” San says honestly, suddenly afraid of being a liar despite how far he’d gone just to convince Wooyoung he could hang with him. He _could_ — there was no way he _couldn’t_ , deep down— but he’s still afraid of the consequences. The part of him that goes to church and falls in line is fighting for dominance now, begging him not to succumb to the lasting breaths of nicotine that hung in the air around them.

He takes a deep breath in as if he’s trying to spite himself. As if he finally is breaking free of his own skin; a shell around his true and raw form that was begging for the chains to snap all this time.

Wooyoung grins at him and offers a hand. His fingers curl around San’s chains like he knows exactly what’s to be done.

“It’s scary the first time,” Wooyoung laughs. “But it gets so easy you don’t even question it.”

“You stop caring?”

San feels his stomach threaten to rip itself away from his body, turning inside out along his inner lining and causing him to hold a deep breath through his nostrils to avoid spilling over while he’s still on the ladder. The hand that’s clutching onto Wooyoung is a lifeline, keeping him steady even as he shakes apart beneath him.

He looks up above him and sees the vision of a demon. There was nothing in Wooyoung’s smile that could ever make him resemble an angel, and San found no use in fooling himself anymore.

Wooyoung has always been more beautiful under the cherry red lights as it is.

“You lose the ability to care.”

San’s hoisted upwards with a single tug that shocks him, legs beginning to buckle as he finally gets onto the roof. They shouldn’t be here, he acknowledges distantly, but his thoughts are too scattered like the stars for him to care. They looked too beautiful above him, almost close enough to touch.

Wooyoung looks too beautiful for him to try understanding how to say no— to understand that he couldn’t just touch despite the proximity.

“Want a smoke?” Wooyoung offers him a small box of cigarettes, the carton almost empty despite the way he jostles it. San finds his fingers plant on one, ensnaring it in his grasp and tugging it out even as his mouth forms the shape of a steady _‘no’._

“You’re an oxymoron,” Wooyoung teases him for it. He’s so ready to tease— so ready to watch San in a way that’s cruel. He’s been waiting to be _mean_.

San’s happy the moment’s finally arrived.

“You’re real shy,” the other continues. “But I can tell in your eyes that you’re real bad.”

It’s true, San thinks. It’s true and Wooyoung knows it— knows him like a dirty secret that’s been patiently waiting to be figured out. That part of him that still goes to church and falls in line starts to die out, pleased with the turn of events as the other half of him wins like the devil on his shoulder.

“What gave it away?” San asks anyway, just to pick apart his own brain without doing any of the work. Even as he asks it, he’s putting the cigarette between his lips and moving closer to Wooyoung’s, pressing so close that they’re nearly touching.

He lights his cigarette with the lasting burn from Wooyoung’s, watching as the other studies him up close when he pulls away.

“You’re awful,” Wooyoung mouths around his cigarette, voice crystal clear despite the way his mouth rushes to snap shut around the small thin rod. “You’re really sick, Choi San.”

“I’m no worse than you,” San says back with a grin. “I just never had a way of showing it.”

They don’t talk after that, staring up at the sky and connecting some of the fake constellations that they've made up in their minds. Ones San used to point out with his mother and father on the off occasion that they weren’t away doing work with more enthusiasm than they’d ever parented. Ones Wooyoung traced on the corners of his ceiling to avoid the tears falling from his eyes.

And they are broken, San knows. Shattered to pieces and strewn about a million different homes in a thousand different cities. Kept in someone’s bag and at the bottom of someone else’s trash bin. Impossible to relocate or reassemble.

“What do you suppose made us bad?”

San perks up at the question, glancing at Wooyoung out of the corner of his eye just to be horrible about it— to not give him the full satisfaction of acknowledgement despite the way he’d heard him loud and clear and would respond to him regardless. Something in San wants to be so mean that Wooyoung walks away from him; probably less so because he was hurt than the fact that he’d punch San square in the jaw.

A part of San wants to be punched. Beat down into the dirt and kicked away like he was nothing. Like he truly was nothing but a worthless delinquent. Like he had sudden reasoning for feeling so _horrid_.

“Depends,” he says anyway. He doesn’t talk about the way his bones are itching to break underneath Wooyoung’s fingers— _maybe another day,_ he thinks. _But not now._ “There’s a lot of fucked up stuff that made us a little less good.”

Good and bad are such archaic words with arbitrary meanings. It’s the reason behind so many deep searing touches on San’s skin— the reason why shame runs rampant with the lights out and why he can never seem to think enough despite being so _aware_ that he’s thought too much.

“We’re here now as a result,” Wooyoung hums. “No purpose, no dreams, no expectations.”

He says it like it’s a prize for their suffering— like it’s pleasurable in this hellscape where they both sink. But San hears the words lying underneath them. _No love, no happiness, nothing to stop the emptiness._

“Smoking cigarettes that for one of us—” San takes a drag in, desperate not to cough as he attempts to puff it out slowly. “Is our first.”

“Gonna be your last?” Wooyoung says in that mean tone— wanting that rise that San wishes he could give him.

“Who knows,” he shrugs. “I don’t know anything anymore.”

They go back to staring at the stars, with their puffs alternating in graying air that gladly latches onto the cold. The frost was beginning to die away slowly, but San still feels the chill in his bones and the minute shivers that run through his nerves. Even his veins have begun to tremble slightly, a vibration sent across him like a slingshot ricocheting discontent along his inner walls.

“I don’t know if I want to be this way forever,” Wooyoung whispers. “I don’t want to always be reckless.”

_‘I wanted to be young for so long,'_ Wooyoung had once told him. _‘But it took some of the worst moments of my life for me to realize I didn’t want to be young— I just wanted to be naïve again. I wanted that ignorant bliss back.’_

“Are you addicted to your cigarettes?” San asks instead of answering, watching the way Wooyoung’s eyes go dark and his mouth twitches with agitation.

“A little, why?”

“Addiction is hard to overcome,” San says with a rise of his shoulders. He drops them down with the crook of his head, taking a long drag from his cigarette just to savor the burn of his lungs. The potent scorching of a single breath that finally— _finally_ better resonates with his brain. This is how it feels to breathe; every last second and every last sigh.

It hurts. It hurts so much that San can do nothing but take an even deeper breath and pretend he likes the hurt.

“If you can get addicted,” he smiles, “you can suffer a lot. Who knows what you’re addicted to.”

The words go unsaid that San truly means, but Wooyoung hears them all the same at the expense of his friendliness. What was easy going finally hardens up, partially stepped upon along with the rest of his trampled pride. 

“You think I can’t get out of this?” He challenges San with his teeth bared— a young scared animal that San is finally seeing for the first time.

He really was much more awful.

“I don’t know if you really want to.”

Wooyoung backs down at that, eyes soft as he stares down at his feet and knocks the tip of his boots together. He had no argument against that— not one that could be made without doubt swirling behind the pools of his eyes. They admittedly both found themselves in that state, wanting to change but too naïve to really know how. What little motive they had was sent into their spiral with the rest of them; a long strung out depressive episode that sprinkled itself in between their highest highs when they were being reckless. They wanted the cycle to end, but were always left to feel too submissive to break it. Powerless, because in the end they were very small.

Wooyoung looks small and innocent now, still capable of loving and being loved like he was supposed to when he was just a boy.

It occurs to San then, how unfair it is. How unfair the world is on them that it takes their first chance to do love right and twists it by its gut until it was retching long and loud along a symphony of other things. They could have been good— by whatever standard good had been. They could have been obedient and kind and _meant it_ , deep down.

But their first chances to be taught had ended in scarred up memories they put deep past defensive behavior. That fire they were supposed to learn how to harness and control had burned them at their first meeting, and now in numbness they let it run rampant and burn down everything along with them.

It wasn’t even pain. It was barely even apathy.

It was solely nothingness for as far ahead as San could see into the future— not even into tomorrow and yet still, into forever somehow.

“You’re the worst, Choi San.”

San smiles at that, using slim fingers to pull the cigarette away from between his teeth.

“We’re the same, aren’t we?”

He finally turns towards Wooyoung in a show of mercy, despite it being a war waged against himself the entire time. Wooyoung wasn’t a part of his mind and could understand it even less, but San plays into his thoughts all the same like Wooyoung can hear every single one. Like he’s into the rabbit hole of San’s mind and he can trust him on how to navigate it perfectly.

In trust, San tries to avoid what he knows or implies. That he and Wooyoung were one and the same— that he was convinced they could be no different.

“We’re similar,” Wooyoung pouts between strawberry lips; normally they were bubblegum pink like he’d been chewing away at lollipops, but the borderline pornographic light of the yard ahead of them casts a sultry glow. His pout, an innocent expression, shifts to something dark and tempting below the shimmering bulbs. 

“Similar,” San repeats it like he’s tasting the word on his tongue. Tasting the permission it gave him to fantasize of many things. Wooyoung was unintentionally adding fuel to his inner fire.

“Yeah,” the other breathes, still pouting sweetly as if his lips were begging to be kissed and suckled until they swelled up and began to look maroon with the saturation. “But the difference is that I’m honest about being bad— and you’re only ever going to show that ugliness to me, aren’t you?”

San feels caught with the dirt of the earth on his hands, though he doesn’t feel as much shame with it as he initially thought he would. The thought of being found out bothers him immensely— but every little thing he’s ever done probably gave him away a long time ago.

“Is it so bad?” He asks Wooyoung in a tone much higher than he’d intended. His breath feels strung tight and hung to dry, the wind fluctuating his vocal chords and causing his voice to crack. “Is it so bad that I’m showing this to you?”

“Why me though?” Wooyoung looks up at him with the stars dusted high along his cheeks, strewn in corners and clusters over the bridge of his nose too. He’s got nebulas and meteors littered around the bruises— the gash at the corner of his lips and the scratches by his temple. He’s made up of so many cosmic things, and San is nothing if not small in front of him. 

And his brain is itching to let Wooyoung know that— that San feels brittle beneath his hold and wants to be shattered. That he is well aware of how worthless he’s become, but Wooyoung’s eyes are so tender that he could lead him to the slaughter and San would gladly play the part of an innocent sheep.

He doesn’t want to scare him away with those incessant perverted thoughts; the ones that beg for inner ruin because he is far, _far_ worse than Wooyoung has ever been. 

“Because we’re similar,” San breathes. “So I would hope you understand more than anyone else.”

There’s a half truth and a half lie in his words. They weren’t really similar, the longer he’s left to dissect them. Their insides were of different shades, San finds. Where Wooyoung’s blood stains his hands a ruby color that tastes like citrus and looks like artificial passion— his was day-old creamy maroon that was beginning to solidify. There was no hiding it, on the inside. Because as apparent as Wooyoung has been about his sin, he’d never sinned even half as much as San does behind closed doors, and that’s what makes him sick. That’s what sets them apart enough for _‘similar’_ to be an insult— one that San clings to like god itself, because he can’t handle the thought of letting go of this new heavenly privilege to be associated with Wooyoung in a single sentence. He knows. He knows better than anyone else how far down the depressive loop goes and how bitter it makes his feelings; but he knows how much he can love. Knows _this_ is it.

This is his greatest potential realized, however lackluster and unwanted. He was so broken that love looked this way on his body; strewn about in parts of obsessive loyalty and vulgar thoughts that begged for his skin to be branded. He couldn’t find the way to tell Wooyoung that he loved him— not when he was filthy and had no way of filtering the sewage from his lips alongside the love confessions.

Wooyoung doesn’t say anything for awhile, studying San’s side profile as he turns away from him. His boots continue to tap together, the smallest click of the leather filling the space like a steady clock tick. It counts away their seconds, spent in silence and anticipating. San traces the freckles along his own neck and allows— if only for a second— the erotic thought of what it’d be like for Wooyoung to kiss each and every one.

“I understand it,” is all Wooyoung says after a while. San hums to it in lieu of an answer because he’s not sure what should be said in this situation. He wonders what normal people do when they fall in love; what the most mundane and boring love stories of the world have still managed to achieve that they have not. 

He’s not asking Wooyoung to whisk him away into a slow sunset; not asking him to press the lasting promise of a life spent together on his lips and put a diamond ring on his finger. Those things were luxuries San has known for a long time he could never obtain.

But a sick part of him entertains the thought. Of Wooyoung coming home tasting like lollipops and mint gum instead of nicotine. Of Wooyoung bending him over a counter in their kitchen and nibbling at his ears while he makes dinner. Of Wooyoung riding a bike through town to and from work, coming home with a golden sheen of sweat along his honey skin as he curls some of his long hair behind an ear, looking ethereal and healthy and full of lost youth that they were never able to embody.

His stomach churns in longing for something they can never have, let alone dream of having like he is now. In truth, the sting is at least the smallest bit pleasurable. San couldn’t swim and yet still, he was hanging by a poolside imagining the ocean. As pathetic as it is, he allows himself the smallest thought.

“We should probably go home,” Wooyoung murmurs. He tugs the cigarette from his lips and tosses it down to the floor beneath them, legs hanging off the edge and threatening to drop all the way down and plunge into nothingness. San wonders what’s stopping them.

“It’s not that late,” San frowns. His cigarette was becoming stale to his lungs, the idea of puffing in and out becoming redundant and painfully repetitive along with it. He tosses his cigarette onto the space next to him, threatening to smite it with his hand if not for Wooyoung’s fingers wrapping around his wrist like a cuff.

“It’ll only hurt,” he smiles. “And it won’t be worth it.”

He brings his boot up along the ledge, digging the front of it into San’s burning cigarette and putting it out.

“It’d put it out all the same,” San mumbles, following Wooyoung as he begins to descend the ladder.

He looks up at San like he knows exactly what he’s seeing— probably has a clearer vision of it than San will ever have.

“But it would leave a mark,” Wooyoung calls up nonchalantly. “And in the end— that mark makes a big difference.”

They walk home with their hands bumping next to one another, surprised by the way they’d managed to sneak in and out of their school grounds so effortlessly. The walk home is slow and empty and yet somehow stifling— the air of an oncoming Spring still trying to decide if it wanted to be humid or cold. San feels his breath make a ghostly wisp in the air, despite the way his arms threaten to sweat beneath the fabric of his sweater.

“You know—” Wooyoung takes a skip or two, kicking at rocks along the main road that was still unpaved. Everything was like that— small and desolate and to a degree, left unfinished. Nothing was ever _whole_. “You might be awful, but I think that’s okay.”

San snorts ungraciously, heart in his throat and tongue wanting to flick out and taste the roof of Wooyoung’s mouth. His eyes want to burn the sight of the sky on this particular night deep into his memory, so much so that the sky would never resemble anything else any other day of the year. Moonless and empty, yet filled to the brim with every fallen angel suddenly shooting across the universe along with their hopes and aspirations. San wants to feel what it’s like to be one with the cosmos— to shine the way Wooyoung does under cherry lights and galactic shadows. 

“How could it suddenly be okay?” San says it with an air of comedy, hoping to turn a moment of weakness into a performance that he knows all too well. Dancing along a tightrope that was burning with the flicker of a lighter— pulling, pulling, _pulling_ until it was ready to snap. He could plunge to his death, or he could make a little show of it all like the cartoon reruns on his TV late at night that he left on, attempting to drown out the incessant thoughts that were keeping him up and squirming and _afraid_.

“It’s not that it’s suddenly okay,” Wooyoung shrugs. “It’s more so that I see— a little better now, I see it.”

And whatever _'it'_ is, San can’t bring himself to care. Wooyoung is turning over his shoulder with a gaze so warming that San feels the first drops of sweat beneath his sweater, like his body is begging to be stripped bare and analyzed part for part. The natural silence of the night becomes so abundant that San feels his head start to ache, overwhelmed by the sheer amount of _nothing_. Over sensitive to the feeling of nothing but Wooyoung in front of him, along the backdrop of a barren town that emphasized just how much of the world the other suddenly took up. And then Wooyoung is everywhere— at every corner San turns, in his lungs, on his tongue begging to be devoured but too much for him to swallow.

He must look as useless as he feels, because Wooyoung is grabbing him by an arm and interlocking their bodies together as they walk side by side, creating a human link with their interwoven skin. San wants to roll up his sleeve and _feel_ — feel the bends of Wooyoung’s biceps against his flesh. Feel the way he radiates an unnatural heat that no one else could feel even if they touched him, because this heat was reserved for San in his mind. This warmth was something Wooyoung held for him the same way he held it for everyone else; too good at making every single person feel like the only one in the world. Too good at tapping into all of San’s secretive filth and exploiting it for what it was.

That sin that he keeps held so dear. That dark trench that Wooyoung was looking up at him from the pit of, smile wide as he offers his dirt-covered hands up and shows San a gem buried deep— as if to say, _I’ve got it. I’ve found the good in you after all._

“The night is a little young,” Wooyoung whispers against the shell of San’s ear. “Let’s just walk together a little longer, okay?”

_Okay_ , San thinks as they walks forward and Wooyoung continues to kick at rocks, the movement dragging San’s body this way and that like a part of Wooyoung’s own. _Okay_ , San finds himself murmuring as Wooyoung leans close and traces his tongue around the shell of San’s earlobe, claiming he wants to know what it feels like for San to hear so much when so little is being said or done. _Okay_ , he’s chanting, as they stand stiff in the middle of a dirt road with Wooyoung kissing every freckle along San’s neck like his lewd imagination had been trying to manifest all along. He’d been holding dirt in his hands and praying for the sifting of his calloused fingers to produce even a sliver of gold— but Wooyoung had been right all along.

“I see it,” he murmurs against San’s neck. “All these freckles are stars.”

_And you are the universe that bestowed them upon me,_ San wants to say. _And you are the reason I exist and the reason I keep existing. And you are everything, even if that means that nothing was ever real and you were nothing at all._

“You’re the worst, Choi San,” Wooyoung whispers. Not a secret, not a question— but the truth. 

“You’re the worst because you think you’re so much more awful than you really are.”

San shakes below him— shakes apart like the meteors that fall down to earth at a self-destructive speed, hitting the pavement the size of a minute pebble that could hardly be seen. He peels himself layer for layer in the hold of Wooyoung’s arm around his, the control his lips have atop his neck as he continues to mouth at the stars there.

“We’re similar,” San finds himself whispering into the night. A promise to stay together, now.

“We’re similar,” Wooyoung affirms him. “So if I have to get better, you have to do it too.”

_‘I don’t want to be this way forever.’_ Wooyoung’s mouth sings against his skin.

_‘I don’t know what’ll happen if we change.’_ San responds back with a whimper. 

And out in the open, with Wooyoung reaching up towards him and placing a hand against his cheek, San falls apart entirely.

He’s a pile of glass on the way home, walking slow and wobbly with his tongue still aching and his hands desperate to fondle. Wooyoung is patient with him as they settle beneath a gnarled tree that was older than the both of them combined, sitting outside of Wooyoung’s house that was barely a ways away down the street. Theoretically, if his mother looked out of her bedroom window right in this moment— she’d find them shaking in one another’s hold, desperate and fleeting and too afraid to fall away.

“What do you think made us so bad?” Wooyoung asks again, as if San’s clouded mind could produce anything but the sound of ocean waves crashing violently against the shore. His tongue is suddenly made of cotton, though it pokes out of his lips and licks them repeatedly like he’s simply trying to get Wooyoung to _look_. 

He does, after a while. Tsks at San cruelly and calls him insatiable, laughing further when it makes San pout until their lips are connected and their tongues are licking up one another’s taste. San is incessant on pushing closer, a hand coming around to Wooyoung’s hair and tugging on the long black locks, making him moan something filthy and all too exposed out beneath this tree as he responds with fervor. They’re disgusting, San knows. Already pulled apart into pieces, licking up one another’s leftovers like starving dogs out in the open. But he’s all too shameless and afraid to never have Wooyoung again to care. His mind only provides— _taste, devour, swallow_ — in rapid succession, trying to mold them into one so that his mouth only tastes like the palate of Wooyoung’s. 

He pulls away with an audible pop, watching as Wooyoung grins at him lazily and holds his hand in the palm of his. He turns San’s hand palm-side up, rubbing a thumb into the unmarked skin.

“You could have damaged this,” he says— breathless, suddenly, despite all the molding of their tongues that they’d been doing. Breathless looking at San’s milk skin. “You could have hurt yourself without thinking, like you’ve been doing for so long.” 

“Maybe that’s what made us so bad,” San murmurs dumbly, eyes glossy and lips the same. “‘Cause in the end, we’re just doing it all mindlessly. We just take what other people tell us and accept it. ‘Cause we’re awful by their standards.”

_ And it took me knowing you to realize that I’m only awful in comparison. That I’m so horrible because I don’t deserve you— but sometimes I don’t know. Right now I don’t know, because right now you want me and I have never been wanted before, let alone by someone as beautiful as you. _

“Their standards are fucking stupid,” Wooyoung whispers as he leans in again. “You’re the worst, Choi San. Don’t ever change.”

San grins against his lips, tongue worming its way into the new home its made for itself right alongside Wooyoung’s, twisting together a beautiful bow that’s strung tight by all their unspoken words. All of those moments of being torn down and beautifully unravelling thanks to others. Every insult, and sin, and flaw that they let hold them down like a leash around their neck. It doesn’t fall away— it doesn’t fix itself, probably never could— but it becomes bearable.

San tastes himself somewhere in Wooyoung, as if they’ve always been one and the same.

And maybe, in both mindless hope and useless mayhem, they always have been.

“You’re the best,” San laughs. And as if to challenge everything Wooyoung’’s ever been— “Don’t ever stay the same.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Wooyoung snickers. “I’m gonna sear every phase of my life into your very core.”

“I wouldn’t want anything else,” San confesses breathlessly, because he truthfully couldn’t. He wants to mold together until their edges are blurred and he’s spent so long observing Wooyoung, he’s not sure what habits are his own.

San’s never loved before; never confessed, never been this breathless and determined to sell away every last painful puff of muddied air to someone else. He’s never found happiness, never kept the good in his life with a determined grip. He’s never been one with the stars or at peace with the emptiness of this giant world.

San’s never been anything but filthy.

He says as much against Wooyoung’s lips, still timid as he leans towards that searing warmth— that warmth that was now for him. That warmth that he could confidently say had its own rendition tailor-made for his thin bones and his hourglass body ticking away with the seconds. 

Wooyoung shrugs at him. The stars sprinkled along his cheeks and atop his nose bridge have spread now— in his eyes and on his bitten and swollen lips with that same gash at the corner.

“There’s a first for everything.”

And San believes it.

**Author's Note:**

> You can come hang out with me on [Twitter!](https://twitter.com/sanniedaize) I would really enjoy making some writer/reader friends to have a good time with.
> 
> Comments and kudos aren't necessitated, but they give me a huge boost of energy that I use to write more! If you like this, please consider dropping a little something to let me know. Feedback is a writer's best weapon! :)
> 
> -n.


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